Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Peter Bernstein Plays Monk

“I’ve heard other guitarists
play Monk and really stress the oddness and the angularity and to a degree I
like what Peter did because its very counter to how most people would approach
the [repertoire].

- Greg Scholl, president and chief
executive of Xanadu/The Orchard

“To his credit, the
translation goes almost unnoticed. What sticks out instead is Bernstein’s
soulful affinity to the material and the dapper chatter of his partners, Doug
Weiss on bass and Bill Stewart on drums.”

- AllAboutJazz website publicity department

“The way Monk approaches
basic harmony is fascinating. He could be playing something within a chord with
his right hand and strike one note with his left hand that was right in the
middle of that chord. It’s the constant surprises.”

-Peter Bernstein, Jazz guitarist

You don’t often
hear Monk’s music played on guitar.

One would suspect
that this is primarily because Monk’s songs are physically scaled for the piano
and its sharp intervals and tangled clusters don’t fall as naturally on a
guitar’s fret board.

On the other hand,
as guitarist Peter Bernstein observed: “There lots of space in Monk’s music and
you don’t have to fill up all the space. And in his music the rhythmic element
is already there – it’s already swinging.”

So it would seem
that for a Jazz guitarist to play Monk’s music, one would have to complement
the affinities while at the same time finding ways around the challenges it
represents to the guitar.

Commenting about
his Monk
[Xanadu/The Orchard] CD, guitarist Peter Bernstein further explained to
Eric Fine in his April 2009 JazzTimesarticle on Peter:

“‘Monk’s music is
very sophisticated music and also very rooted and it has great strength in its
simplicity. When I got into it, I found that certain voicings did lay on the
guitar because of the spacing. It’s really not the sound of the piano … it’s
the sound of Monk playing the piano.’

Even so, Bernstein
struggled at times to translate the music to the guitar because of the
instrument’s technical limitations.

‘I’ve always been
frustrated as a guitar player harmonically,’ he said, ‘because you can’t play
all the notes like a piano player can. The range is smaller, and it’s harder to
play closer voicings on the guitar because you have to stretch between
strings.'”

George Kantzer in
his review for AllAboutJazz.com offered these thoughts about Peter’s
accomplishments on his Monk CD:

“Thelonious Monk never employed or recorded with a guitarist
(save early bootlegged jam sessions with Charlie Christian and a big band with
Howard Roberts) and his piano playing and arranging can hardly be called
guitar-like. Hearing guitar play Monk's music is like hearing an orchestral
version of a Wagner opera aria; it reveals a wholly different aspect of the
music. …

And Bernstein is a
graceful guitarist who polishes the rough pianistic edges Monk gouged into his
tunes."

Summing it up,
Bernstein said: “Monk has his own musical universe. For me he was the sound of
New York – like home.”

The following
video which was developed in conjunction with the ace graphics team at
CerraJazz LTD and StudioCerra Productions offers a
sampling of Bernstein Plays Monk on its audio track which is comprised of
Peter performing Monk’s Brilliant Corners
along with Doug Weiss on bass and Bill Stewart on drums.